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news
Halfords Fix Your Bike“Nightmare” government Fix Your Bike scheme leaves bike shops waiting for payment
Bike shops participating in the government’s Fix Your Bike voucher scheme, which opened to the public in late July and provides a voucher worth £50 to help get neglected bikes back on the road, are reportedly encountering problems in being refunded money for work they have carried out, with one bicycle repair shop saying that the way the scheme operates is “a nightmare.”
> Fix Your Bike voucher scheme opens to public
Under the terms and conditions of the scheme for participating repairers, issued in June, the Energy Saving Trust (EST), which administers the initiative on behalf of the Department for Transport (DfT), says it will download claims weekly, “with payment made within 5 working days of download (+ 3 to 5 working days for BACS).”
However, Cycling Industry News reports that some bike shops are expressing their frustration at the time it is taking for them to receive money, with concerns raised both on its own closed Facebook group, as well as on private cycle industry-focused groups on the social media platform.
The trade website says that delays of more than a fortnight to be paid are being experienced, with Barry Redman of the social enterprise MerseyCycle, based in Huyton, Liverpool, saying: “It’ll be three weeks on Wednesday and I’ve been waiting for a reply for 5 days to my email.”
Responses to a poll by Cycling Industry News found that payments had either been made outside the timeframe, or had not yet been made at all.
One bike repair shop in Cheshire told Cycling Industry News: “We’ve had 19 vouchers through our doors, I’ve redeemed 17 of them as were waiting for parts for the remaining two bikes.
“The first voucher redeemed was on August 3rd, 2020 and I’ve been redeeming them daily since then. I have received no payment as yet from The Energy Saving Trust despite promises of payments between 5-12 days after redemption.
“Due to the freeze on releasing more vouchers we have now got customers cancelling bookings as they want, and need, to have a voucher to be able to afford the relevant repairs.
“This is a nightmare as we are really busy so it’s very frustrating to have slots booked and cancelled due to no vouchers being available and absolutely no indication of when they can be applied for again.
“The voucher scheme is a great thing, but the logistics of it is letting customers and repairers down.”
The scheme, which operates solely in England – a separate scheme in Scotland is administered by Cycling UK on behalf of the Scottish Government – was first announced by transport secretary Grant Shapps in early May.
He said that 500,000 vouchers would be made available, at a cost to the government of £25 million, as people were encouraged to switch to active travel for daily journeys to ease pressure on public transport as well as not using cars to avoid gridlock on the roads.
Initially, the scheme had been due to go public by the end of June, but by the time the first tranche of 50,000 vouchers were released four weeks later – initially causing the website to crash – levels of motorised traffic were already returning to pre-lockdown levels.
One London bicycle repair shop told road.cc at the weekend that they had decided against participating in the scheme in part due to the bureaucracy involved in processing the vouchers, and also because they felt that the initiative had been launched to the public too late.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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25 comments
Given this government's recent hiring decisions, including...
...I expect Prime Minister Cummings will hire cyclist-hater and walking shambles Rod Liddle to sorted out this bicycle repair voucher scheme. Who will personally visit every shop and untighten all the quick releases. Then be made a Lord.
Yeah. remember the Mark Duggan riots in North London back in 2011? There are businesses that were burnt to the ground or damaged by fire that are still waiting to get some money from the Government so they can be compensated or at get themselves back in business.
Good effort that.
Really? That's so ridiculous.
(And I'd thought the worst thing to come out of that was someone getting jail time for stealing a bottle of water from a (apparently already broken-into and looted) shopfront...).
I cant find the article- but there was one a few years ago that said only an extremely small amount from the big pile of money the government had set asside had been claimed by affected people and businesses. You dont really hear about it because the media isnt interested in making it known. Meanwhile the government thinks if they keep quiet about it, people will forget about it...In 2016 Sony took the government to the supreme courts for compensation as their warehouse in enfield had been burnt to the ground with whatever stock that was inside.
people pay for home or business insurance but when something happens the insurance companies dont want to pay out and I have never heard of David Cameron, Theresa May or bojo putting pressure on insurance companies to get them to give people money
Meanwhile the MET paid Mark Duggan's family an undisclosed sum of money in an out of court settlement.
I did actually manage to find one article dated 2014
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/10892256/Shortfall...
I doubt the situation has improved given Cameron's departure, May's coming and going & now Bojo
The T&C's quoted above give a maximum time from redeeming the voucher to recieving payment of 21 days.
As far as I can glean from the article none of the people quoted have been waiting that long.
Where does it say that?
In the T&C's quoted in the article.
Are you sure? I've read through the Ts and Cs, there's literally no reference to 21 days anywhere in them. Can you give a clause reference?
I'll repeat one more time.
The T&C's quoted in the article.
If the article has quoted them incorrectly that's not really my concern.
OK, so you can't give me a clause reference. Because it doesn't exist. And you're talking shit.
It's what he does best.
Under the terms and conditions of the scheme(link is external) for participating repairers, issued in June, the Energy Saving Trust (EST), which administers the initiative on behalf of the Department for Transport (DfT), says it will download claims weekly, “with payment made within 5 working days of download (+ 3 to 5 working days for BACS).”
From the article.
As I said repeatedly.
Weekly claim - 0-7 days
Processing 5 working days - 5-7 actual days depending on weekend
BACS 3 -5 working days - 3 -7 actual days depending on weekend.
I suppose that is how you got 21 days. It is on odd way of referring to it.
Do you really suppose that all these unpaid claims were made just after the weekly download and all the weekends aligned? Isn't it just more likely that the payments are not being made as fast as promised which is the premise of the story.
I know which I believe.
PS Just saying it repeatedly, but not explaining your logic doesn't really help people understand your point.
Even if none of the claimants have been waiting for the theoretical maximum time to be payed, it's a pretty poor effort to bury that information in the T&Cs and expect them to dig through and add up all the lead times (including remembering to add in weekends) in order to find it. It should have been clearly communicated up front, and if it hasn't been then it seems entirely reasonable for them to be disgruntled when they subsequently find out that they've taken an unexpected hit to their cashflow.
The weekends wouldn't need to align, 5 full working days will always take you to the next week as there are only 5 working days in a week.
My initial post made it perfectly clear what I was referring to. The article is quite short. If some people can't be bothered to read the article prior to commenting I don't see why I should spoon feed the information to them.
Take your point on weekends.
So all claims should be paid within 10 - 21 days of submission depending on submission date and weekly download and whether BACs took 3 or 5 working days.
On being understood, you can decide you were clear and it is everybody else who was at fault and didn't understand, or you could consider if you could be clearer. I know which of those two options generally works best for me.
People weren't claiming they didn't understand the T&C's, they were saying that they did not know where I'd seen them.
They were quite clearly described in the article, other than saying 'in the article' I'm not sure what more I could have done.
I can't find it either
I'm sure that this is fake news and that road.cc should be retracting it and offering an apology for disseminating it. After all this is the most competent, honest, brave and straight-dealing government ever, with no hint of lying, cheating, hypocrisy or cowardice.
Just look at their successes with covid deaths, the thorough investigation into vote-rigging, and their latest triumph of exam results.
I think I might have mentioned at the time that trying to push through a voucher scheme too quickly would likely result in the payment systems back to the shops suffering and that inevitably there would be an article like this bemoaning that
But I suspect it's just they didnt anticipate the shops submitting them on a per voucher daily basis rather than submitting them as a batch to process, as there is a monetary cost associated with processing the whole thing & for payments made too and theyd probably much rather it was done in bigger bulk that's causing the delay, though the wheels of government finance rarely move that swiftly
Anybody not anticipating that should resign immediately and take up something rather more within their capabilities, which excludes running a whelk stall; street cleaner maybe? If they didn't want them submitted that way, they should have made it clear and only allowed batch submissions.
I must say, this government of Eton yahoos is just as competent as I thought it would be.
seems a bit unfair to criticise the government based solely on my wild speculation
Im only offering an opinion on what the delay maybe not stating its a concrete fact, but I know systems work better processing batches, than individual payments and a BACS payment costs on average 23p per transaction to pay, for half a million vouchers each paid separately, that alone adds £115,000 into the cost of delivering the scheme
so my expectation was always there would some delay in shops receiving their money back from the vouchers, and was always the upfront risk the shops took signing up for the deal, but perhaps that wasnt communicated clearly enough to them
But everything the Johnson government touches turns to shit.
While your wild (?) speculation contributed, it certainly wasn't the only thing leading to my conclusions of incompetence and stupidity; I was going by their record. Coincidentally, this just appeared on Gammon Magazine's fb feed. https://www.facebook.com/gammonmag/photos/a.324985478075280/753746291865861
I had to take issue with their obviously erroneous statement; living has nothing to do with it.
I don't think I would trust Gavin Williamson to be an effective street cleaner.